July, 2009

About Windows Management Infrastructure Blog

To provide IT Professionals, Management Solution Providers, Hosted Service providers and Developers visibility into feature ideas, opinions and solutions from the Windows Management Platform team. To empower IT Professionals with ideas/tools that will help with Data Center automation, Manageable Web Services and Enterprise wide IT management. To provide information around rapidly evolving trends in management technologies, Data Center trends and Management Best Practices

Following is a brief overview of the different management technologies we will be discussing in this blog:

Note: We may be adding more technologies in the future<o:p></o:p>

Windows PowerShell:Microsoft’s next generation Command Line Shell and Scripting Technology.

WinRM (Windows Remote Management): Windows implementation of the WSManagement Standard ratified by the DMTF with additions for Remote Shell (Powershell 2.0 uses WinRM for remoting) and Cert less encryption. WSManagement is a SOAP based protocol for uniform management of heterogeneous software, devices, applications and services. More information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384426.aspx

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation): Windows implementation of Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM). CIMOM provides enterprise applications with uniform access to the management data. WMI uses the Common Information Model (CIM) to represent systems, applications, devices and other managed components. WMI data can be accessed remotely via DCOM or firewall friendly WinRM. More information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394582(VS.85).aspx

BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service): A Windows technology for transferring files across a network. BITS transfers are asynchronous to the application, support UNC and HTTP paths, and can use a “background” mode that minimizes the impact to other processes and network traffic. More information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa362708.aspx

If you’re an IT Pro, PowerShell remoting is a great tool for doing quick, ad hoc management tasks on computers from the comfort of your own home or office. However, before you can log into a machine, you have to make sure that it’s properly configured...

Everybody knows that security is a big deal, especially when your servers are internet-connected. When an administrator wants to protect a machine from possible remote attacks, a common quick-reflex defense is to block incoming traffic on ports 80 and...